"There are some letters--Muriel's. I have them all--she wrote great letters from the Front. They're all numbered in a despatch box. Will you keep the box for me--and--" he hesitated again, but she waited, uttering no word, "if I don't reclaim the statue--send them to her?" He saw that she assented, and after that he dare not trust himself longer. Almost abruptly he said good-bye and went. BOOK VI EAST AGAIN CHAPTER I I John and young Sanderson were half asleep in the orange grove that sheltered the row of tents from the merciless midday sun. All the afternoon they had dozed, just under the oranges that ripened within their reach; but about four o'clock, the noise of a Ford car coming up the boarded track to the aerodrome, from its journey to Jaffa, woke them from their siesta. A party had been down into the port on a day's excursion. It was their last probably, for early at dawn, on the morrow, the great attack was to be made and every one of the aeroplanes now receiving final touches from the mechanics would be soaring in that blue and cloudless heaven whence death would rain upon the trenches below. "I haven't written those blessed letters after all," said Sanderson yawning. "I must do it to-night." He stood up, a slim graceful youth in his shorts and khaki shirt. The fierce Eastern sun had browned his legs and arms, though it had not caught him so fiercely as John. He rubbed his fingers through his wavy hair and looked down at his companion. "Do you know, Dean, I think you must be the re-incarnation of an arab sheik--I never knew a fellow who loved the desert heat like you--you're looking splendidly fit." He laughed and threw an orange at his companion as he lay in the shade. "There's something feline about the way you purr in this devilish climate." John smiled, stood up and collected the letters he had written. "Let's hear the news from Jaffa," he said to Sanderson--and strolled across the clearing towards the fringe of tents. They had been together since John's arrival two months back, and this happy-go-lucky lad of twenty reminded him at moments of poor Marsh. He had the same volatile spirits, now very elated or full of apprehension, tireless and restless, and very human and often childlike in certain moods. It was to John that he raved about Mary, the little English girl in faraway Sussex, and so deep became their intimacy that he entrusted her letters to John, for him to co-operate in his intense admiration of her wonderful epistolary style, her unbounded lovableness. John soon knew much about his mother and father, the latter a retired naval officer living in a little house on the Devon Coast; through Sanderson, he could see the gentle little lady who wrote in such a perfect hand with unbroken regularity, chronicling the small events of the domestic round. That Sanderson loved her devotedly, John knew from the light that came into his eyes when he talked of her.